The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism

Economic populism has transmuted the Republican Party, and that new version of the GOP has just gone from one standard bearer to two.

Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate suggests he is leaning harder into the economic policy instincts that helped land him his first term in 2016 and that he no longer feels the need to placate the type of free-market conservatives who have dominated the party for decades.

The former president’s views on tariffs, spending and immigration were no doubt a key ingredient to his electoral success in 2016. But he chose Mike Pence as his vice president for that race — a candidate with more traditionally conservative free-market viewpoints.

Now, the center of gravity has shifted, and Republicans in Congress will feel the pull if Trump wins in November.

Few Republicans have been more vocally critical of the party’s modern economic conventions than Vance, who has embraced not just tariffs, but also policies like a higher minimum wage and increased barriers to corporate mergers — even openly praising President Joe Biden’s aggressive antitrust chief, Lina Khan.

He is uninterested in traditional small-government priorities. Consider the answer he gave to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat when asked about fiscal discipline and the prospect for reforming Social Security (which is more than a fifth of total federal spending).

“One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t. So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people,” he said.

“If the argument here is we have to cut Social Security, then what you’re effectively saying is we just have to privatize what is currently a public problem of who pays for the older generation,” he added. “And I don’t know why people think you solve many problems by taking a bunch of elderly people and saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”

Not the answer you’d expect from an old-school Republican, although — to my point — it is hard to identify precisely what “Republican” means from a policy standpoint. The national debt is not even mentioned in the platform adopted by the GOP on Monday, even though it’s a regular talking point among lawmakers.

In my conversations with executives in recent months, many of them seem to believe that Trump — promising lower taxes and fewer regulations — will ultimately be good for their bottom line. The selection of Vance gives shape to a second term in a way that might give them more pause.

It’s hard to paint a full picture yet of what the Vance pick might mean for Trump 2.0, but it’s an early indication that the sort of Wall Street types who held key positions in the former president’s first term — think former Goldman Sachs COO Gary Cohn — might have less influence this go-around.

It’s also further evidence that Trump intends to venture more deeply into industrial policy, where the government plays a much more active role in shaping the economy with tools like tariffs. Vance is an enthusiastic proponent.

“You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers” if Trump wins a second term, Vance told POLITICO this spring .

Trump, of course, already dramatically shifted the policy conversation during his last time in the Oval Office, shattering bipartisan norms around trade and using the bully pulpit to shape private companies’ behavior.

But it’s still a common theme among Republicans that government needs to get out of businesses’ way. The Trump-Vance approach doesn’t abandon that message, but it does muddy it.

Some Republicans have sounded wary about this development.

“If and when he gets guided to support policies with which I disagree ... I look forward to engaging with Vance, whether he’s a senator or whether he’s a vice president, to make sure that we are reminding the country that free-market capitalism is America First,” Rep. Andy Barr , a Kentucky Republican vying to lead the Financial Services Committee next year, told my colleague Zach Warmbrodt before the VP pick was announced.

Vance’s “America First” ideology is also fundamentally rooted in nativism. Vance, like other key voices in Trump’s orbit, describes a view of Americans as workers first, rather than consumers. And immigrants are fundamentally a threat to higher wages and raise costs for necessities like housing and health care, in his telling.

“The trade issue and the immigration issue are two sides of the same coin: The trade issue is cheaper labor overseas; the immigration issue is cheaper labor at home, which applies upward pressure on a whole host of services, from hospital services to housing and so forth,” Vance told Douthat.

It’s an inverse of mainstream economic theory, which says that more people can help the economic pie grow rather than being stuck in a zero-sum game and that immigrants are particularly important to fill jobs as the native-born population ages.

Trump has battered these ideas and principles since 2016. And if he’s elected again, he’ll have a vice president to help him finish the job.